Nothing new under the sun, eh? How ‘bout among what lurks in the darkness, then?

Nothing new under the sun, eh? How ‘bout among what lurks in the darkness, then?

Back in my days as a Classicist, I specialized somewhat in Hellenistic poets and poetry, as well as in the Roman expression of those same novel Hellenistic artistic sympathies in the so-called neoteric school, so dubbed after the Greek word for “newer.” So when I read modernist poet Ezra Pound enjoining his colleagues and posterity to “make it new,” my heart sings. Satanism can be defined in so many different and contradictory ways, and many of them seem to differ little, if at all, from other already established religiosities. In this post, I argue that if Satanism is to constitute something more than a metonym, meronym, hyponym, or synonym of some other variety of religious belief and practice, it needs to be defined in a unique and exhaustive way so as to differentiate it from the religiosity bequeathed to us by our various historical “makers.” Like the obscene statue of Pan buggering a goat unearthed from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, I’m here getting the goat of both Satanists and non-Satanists alike by defining a practice that is at once restrictive and liberating, heretical and non-relativist. Maybe there really is nothing new out in the sunshine. That leaves us with the shadows and larger darkness looming over the horizon in the gloaming to explore. If you’re up for probing these confining, but nonetheless exciting, new spaces, click here for more.